Narrative

A propertyless theatre for the propertyless class Tom Thomas (1977) I was born on 18 June 1902 in Gayhurst Road, Dalston, East London, a road which was a typical mix of comfortable respect­ability and hand-to-mouth poverty. My father was a basketmaker, a very ancient craft: he told me that my brother and I were the first males in the family who had not followed the trade. He was a staunch trade unionist but politically he was a Liberal. The only political words I ever heard from him were when he recounted how a work-mate had been so bitterly disappointed at the failure of the German workers to oppose the Kaiser’s government on the question of war. After all their undertakings at conferences to have a General Strike, there was nothing. My father was quite happy about that because it showed that his work-mate, who was a keen socialist, was wrong.I became a socialist, an emotional and ill-formed one, quite early in life because of the influence of my grandmother who was an Ulster Unionist, and of her Daily Mail, which was the only news­paper that came into our house. I read it each day from the age of seven or eight. Disgust turned to loathing as I read the campaigns which it ran against the reforms which the Liberal government of Mr Asquith was introducing. ‘Ninepence for fourpence’ shrieked the Mail, in horror at the new National Insurance scheme. The proposal to pay a pension of 5s a week to persons of seventy who had actually not contributed a single penny to the cost of providing it, was an almost criminal act in the Mail9s eyes, a loosening of the moral fibre of the nation. In the same issue I would read fulsome descriptions of country house parties, presentation parties, etc. The clothes worn and the meals eaten received the full flunkey treat­ment. I was nauseated by such selfishness. When I sang in the church choir, ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich He hath sent empty away’, I looked at the

occupants of the pews, and it was clear to me that He hadn’t done any of these things and it was about time somebody else did.On the way back home from school one drenching, wet day, I passed a house where something unusual was taking place. Beds, bedding, furniture, clothing had been thrown out in the front garden and were getting soaked and probably ruined. I asked my mother why this was happening and was told, ‘They haven’t paid their rent.’ This made a deep impression on me, that people and their poor belongings could be treated like this.At school, at church and at home these things were never discussed, so I resorted to books. I was already a voracious reader, and by the time I was fourteen I had read Shaw, Wells and Galsworthy. I had also come across Blatchford’s Merrie England, and having read about evolution I had left the church. Then I read the Hammonds’ Town Labourer and Village Labourer and learned how the underdogs had been treated in the past.My own family situation taught me much. My father was a craftsman, a basketmaker, and for some years the president of the London Society of Basketmakers. He earned around 30s a week. We lived in a small, reasonably comfortable house in a district which had large gardens. But the rent was crippling, and we only paid it by taking in a lodger who got meals at week-ends. Even with this extra my mother had to pinch and scrape to provide food. New clothes were very rare indeed. My mother, the family financier, gave my father every morning his sandwiches and his tram fare for the day and that was that until the weekend when he was given a shilling or so to go to the pub to meet his friends. That seemed a lousy existence for an intelligent and hard-working man.But it was the War which really educated me politically. First, the tragic absurdity of the bishops on both sides praying for victory to the self-same God. Seeking the real cause of that ghastly blood­bath, I heard of meetings at Finsbury Park on Sunday mornings. At these, which were organized by the Herald League,1 I listened to anti-war speakers who sometimes received quite a rough hand­ling from some of the crowd. Here I bought the New Leader, the paper of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and other literature and learned how the war, in their opinion, was caused. It was here that I bought my first copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists which was to me, as to many others, both a revelation and an

A propertyless theatre for the propertyless class 79 inspiration. I joined the Herald League, but apart from attending their meetings, there was little I could do. Then came the Russian Revolution with the overthrow of the Tsar. I had read translations of the Russian novelists and knew that all that was best in Russia had fought for the destruction of this tyranny. I followed the events from March 1917 onwards with the greatest interest and when in November the Bolsheviks took power in what at the* outset was practically a bloodless revolution, I, with socialists everywhere, felt that a new era had dawned in the tragic history of mankind and of the oppression of the masses by their owners and masters. Right from the Spartacus revolt in Rome and earlier, through peasant risings and in our own Civil War in the seven­teenth century, the hungry and oppressed had risen against their masters, only to fail. But now, a real workers’ republic had been born. Within a few weeks, many decrees, including the nationaliz­ation of the land, the banks and large enterprises, without compen­sation, showed that this was a revolution aimed at the destruction of capitalism, root and branch. An immediate peace without annexations and without indemnities was called to stop the horrors of the war. Henceforward I was a socialist, I joined the ILP and later, when individuals were admitted, the Labour Party, playing an active part particularly at elections. I was active in the Labour Party for a number of years but in 1926 I left it because of the way the General Strike had been betrayed. I could not continue under the MacDonald leadership which I was convinced would commit fresh betrayals, so I joined the only other socialist organization, the Communist Party, and remained in it for many years, though after the Second World War I rejoined the Labour Party, of which I am a member today.So by 1926 I had a firm political commitment and by then I had also developed a deep interest in the theatre and music. After leaving school at fourteen and getting a job as a clerk in a stockbro­ker’s office, I studied a course of commercial subjects at a London County Council evening institute. This course included a leavening of non-commercial subjects, English and Drama. I very much enjoyed these subjects but when I was seventeen or eighteen I had to make a decision; it was clear that to study for a degree or equivalent in the commercial subjects I should have to put in another three or four years and of necessity abandon literature and drama, there was no time for both. I decided to follow the studies

which would teach me how to live and not merely how to get a higher level of pay in capitalist society, which seemed likely to collapse of its own rottenness within my lifetime. So I threw myself wholeheartedly into the drama group, the Queen’s Players, which was run by a brilliant young man, A. C. Ward, who after­wards published a string of books for literature and drama studies. He produced very effectively Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night) and many modern plays, chiefly Shaw, in which I earned myself leading roles to my very great enjoyment. I also started going up to the theatres in the West End with a friend of mine. I got into the habit of going every week, and got a very good view of the triviality of it, the unpleasant outlook of the West End stage at the time - all Oxford accents except for the funny servants.I was also interested in music. As soon as I began work at the age of fourteen, I went to the concerts at South Place2 every Sunday night. And that was the most wonderful privilege. We heard the current leading soloists and quartets. My only musical education was as a choir boy till about the age of eleven, when I left the church. When I was nineteen years old, I joined the London Phil­harmonic Choir. I also applied for membership of the Madrigal Society, but I hadn’t read music for so many years since leaving church and choir that they failed me on sight reading. I was with the Philharmonic Society for eight years. It was really quite a wonderful experience. Singing with the orchestra gives one a wonderful insight into the whole mechanism.In the mid-1920s my two main interests came together in a quite unexpected way. In the winter months the Hackney Labour Party invited Labour supporters and their neighbours to free ‘socials’ on occasional Saturday nights. There was usually a good attendance, for then there was no TV and radio was in its infancy, but what could be offered but speeches and then tea and biscuits. The school halls that we used were at least warm compared with the homes that many people came from. But they were rather dull occasions enlivened by the rare good speech. Just to brighten things up I put on Sealing the Compact, a one-act play by Gwen John I found in the library of the British Drama League. It was a one-act play dealing with a pit tragedy. There was no stage, not even a plat­form, but somehow we established a playing area, rigged up a couple of screens and some props. With a minimum of furniture

we managed to suggest a miner’s cottage. And the lift up! The interest! The applause! It was most enthusiastically received and we repeated it several times at other socials.Then it struck me, here was something people really enjoyed coming to, which was also a way of spreading the message. So in 1926 I started the Hackney Labour Dramatic Group. I got hold of two of the brightest people in the Labour Party, Herbert Butler and Albert Cullington. I disagreed with them politically, but they were used to public speaking and once you’re a public speaker you’re not very far from being an actor. Butler afterwards became one of the Members of Parliament for Hackney. He was for many years the manager of a furniture business in Whitechapel Road. He had come into the Labour Party after the First World War, when he became active in the NUX - a militant, left-wing version of the British Legion, called the National Union of ex-Servicemen. I don’t know what Cullington did. Like Butler he was a very capable person, used to street-corner work and public speaking. They were the younger generation in the Labour Party, both very active. Neither of them stayed beyond the first show, but it was a tremen­dous help to have the leavening of people who could learn their lines and speak with a minimum of producing. Then in the same show we had Kath Duncan, who became a well-known member of the Communist Party. She was a very strong personality with a Scottish background. She and her husband had a house in Upper Clapton and my wife and I went to live in an upstairs flat there.The Hackney Labour Dramatic Group gave its first performance on 24 April 1926 at the Library Hall, Stoke Newington. We were supported by the Hackney Trades Council and included - we claimed - ‘all shades of working-class opinion’. Later we changed our name to the Hackney People’s Players, and then in 1928 we became a branch of the Workers’ Theatre Movement.We started off with one-act plays. The first programme of the Hackney Labour Dramatic Group had four plays - Augustus Does His Bit, by Bernard Shaw, A Woman's Honour, by Susan Glass ville, The Man on the Street, by Sutro, and Twelve Pound Look, by Barrie.I spent many hours in the library of the British Drama League, searching for plays which dealt with the realities of the lives of the working class in Britain, and which analysed or dissected the social system which had failed to prevent the war, had completely failed to deliver the ‘homes for heroes’ promised during the war, and

maintained a class system in which the wealthy flourished, and the great majority of the people were their wage slaves. But I could find no such plays. So it was clear that if the People’s Players was to fulfill its aim of exposing the evils of the capitalist system, and the oppression of the people, then the plays had to be written. By whom? At that juncture there was only one answer - by me. And by anyone else whom I could persuade to attempt the task. But until the plays were written, the group had to be kept in being and trained, putting on whatever plays I could find which had some modicum of ‘social significance’.Capek’s R.U.R. was an obvious choice. It had had a run in the West End. Its theme was the manufacture of mechanical men and women who would carry out all the work previously performed by the working class, with no food or other requirements, except fuel. These robots were clearly the ideal solution for the capitalist class, and promised an immense reduction in costs, and a subser­vient class of slaves. But the robots developed human feelings, and became what their masters called ‘unreliable’. Untimately they overthrew their masters, the human race. It was a clear and unique parable of the workers’ revolution we were hoping for.3After R.U.R., in the next few months we put on single perform­ances of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice. They were well received but in subsequent discus­sions we came to two important realizations. We were still performing plays which in our view added nothing of real value to the people’s struggle. And secondly, we were performing them to an audience of friends and supporters and not breaking through to the vast majority who were yet to hear the socialist message.By the middle of 1927 the Hackney People’s Players, as we now called ourselves, was an organization of about twenty members. We played mainly at working men’s clubs and we also had one or two requests from Labour and Communist Parties. Most of the members of the group came from Hackney but some from other parts of the East End. We were a success. We were able to buy ourselves a nice lighting set, for example, with dimmers and floods and spots. We had successfully tackled several modern plays. What was more significant, a number of workers were finding that there was a group who would perform their efforts and they began to write for us. Lady Betty’s Husband, an election playlet by Bernard Woolf, was one of them. I wrote a play about Chiang Kai Shek -

at the time he seemed to be leading a people’s movement against the old regime. Then I wrote a play called Betty Burton’s Father. It was about a father who had been in jail because of his activities in the General Strike and what happened to Betty at school when the other children learned about it. I wrote it for the Hackney Young Pioneers.4The first full-length play I wrote - we produced it in 1927 - was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It was a book which cried out to be made into a play and when I re-read it I realized that it had the material not just for one play but a dozen. The book depicted the life of working people with tragic realism. It criticized the capitalist order of society in new and striking ways. And it showed the utter emptiness of the catch-phrases by which the ‘philanthrop­ists’ who slaved their lives away in misery, for the benefit of their masters, were bamboozled into voting for their oppressors at elections. The plight of the working class had been depicted in many novels, but this was almost the first novel to be written by a victim of the system who had himself suffered from hunger, unemployment and the personal humiliation of a gifted man at the hands of ignorant but all-powerful employers.I decided that the play should be as unashamedly propagandist as the novel, and should not depart from Tressell’s words except as demanded by dramatic effectiveness. The final scene in the novel was omitted - i.e., of Owen bringing up blood from his tubercular lungs and resolving that he would kill his wife and child and then himself rather than leave them to suffer the life of hunger and misery which would be their fate if they survived him. After the abounding confidence in the socialist future of mankind in Owen’s great oration, it would have been wrong for the audience to be plunged into Owen’s final tragedy. By bringing down the curtain on a great shout ö f ‘Aye!’ to the resolution ‘That socialism is the only remedy for unemployment and poverty’ (and this invariably occurred) - the audience participated in the triumph of Owen and his ideals.It would be difficult to say who enjoyed it more, the audience or the players. From the moment the curtain went up and Bert White, the starveling tea-boy, was told ‘I don’t think much of this bloody tea’, a roar of laughter at such a commonplace but unex­pected phrase being heard on the stage, in people’s own language, spurred the actors to get a laugh out of every appropriate line, and

of course treat the serious scenes with the full emotion which they demanded. It was clear that there was a real rapport between the audience and the play. It was about a world they recognized and understood. The cast that night, fourteen in all, included two electricians, two clerks, a book-keeper, a former able-seaman, a tailor, a haberdashery salesman, two housewives, and two cabinet­makers.The play went down very well. The best evidence of that was at the Mildmay Radical Club. It was the biggest and best working man’s club in North London, I was told.5 It certainly had a very fine hall and a very fine stage. They paid us £8 for a single show. When I got there the chap at the bar said, ‘Who’s the guv’nor here?’ and I said, ‘Well I’m not the guv’nor, but I’ll answer for the group.’ And he said to me, ‘Well, I always tell people who are putting on shows that they must finish by quarter to ten because we have to close the bar at ten and they must have their drinking time. So I’m telling you that at a quarter to ten I’ll ring a loud bell and if you haven’t finished then they’ll all walk out on you.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, but this is a play and we can’t leave it in the middle.’ Well, the house was pretty full and sure enough at quarter to ten the bell rang out but not a single soul got up to leave - the best tribute.After several performances had been given to Labour Parties in their halls in various parts of London we had to apply for a licence for a public performance in the Edmonton Town Hall. The Lord Chamberlain objected to the number o f ‘bloodys’ in the text - 31. I pointed out that Shaw had broken the ice with a single and celebrated ‘bloody’ in Pygmalion and that I had already been guilty of misrepresenting the vocabulary of the building workers by leaving out all the numerous and then completely unprintable words with which their language was embellished. We finally compromised: 15 ‘bloodys’ would be licensed, 16 or over, not. I agreed but left an all important question unanswered because unasked - namely - who would count the ‘bloodys’?After the Mildmay shows we were booked by clubs in many parts of London, even one as far out as Braintree, Essex, which we reached by motor car. One of our best performances was at the Manor Hall, Hackney. We were interrupted by the arrival of a column of Hunger Marchers from the North who received a rousing reception from audience and players alike, after which the

play was continued to a super-packed audience and tumultuous applause.We received as much as £1 for some of these shows, which covered the fares of the cast and left an income for the group with which in time we were able to build a stage lighting set (two floods, two spots, switchboard and a dimmer). Normally our members, leaving their jobs at, say, 6 p.m., found their own way by bus, tram or tube to the club at which we were performing, carrying their own props and even additional props which were not personal but had to be brought for the show. We gave 30 performances in the first year, which placed a considerable burden on all taking part, but for each it was a memorable experience, a living contact with working-class audiences - audiences who perhaps for the first time were seeing their own lives, their suffer­ings, their problems portrayed on the stage.We had now achieved both our original aims. We were able to play to new audiences and not only to the Labour supporters, presenting to them the socialist message in Tressell’s uniquely effective words. We still needed new plays, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists included only two parts for women and new plays were necessary for other members of the group who we were not then using. I would have liked to organize a second group to undertake this while keeping the RTP for as long as there was a demand from a club, which might have been for years. But this would have strained our human resources (all unpaid); besides we all felt we had a duty to reflect the world-shaking events which had occurred since Tressell wrote his masterpiece in the early years of the century. So in 1928 I wrote Women of Kirbinsk, a one-act play which took place in a remote Russian village in the period 1917-18. With most of the men called up for the war the women have to face the problems of the village. Driven desperate by hunger they decide to take over the estate of the local landowner; there is confrontation but despite his threats they hold on to the land. Then a man comes back from the army with the news of the revolution and that the land question has been solved by a decree of the socialist government authorizing the peasants to take over the land.The second of our new plays was The Fight Goes On. It was set in a mining village during the months of lock-out which followed the betrayal of the General Strike. I contrived a situation in which

86 The Workers’ Theatre Movement (1926-1935): Narrative the local coal-owner visits a family whose man is in prison for the part he has played during the General Strike. Catastrophe has struck the family with the death of the baby son whom the father has never seen. There are bitter exchanges between the young wife, her parents, and the coal-owner, interrupted by the marching and singing of a large demonstration come to express solidarity and sympathy. A speech is made (off-stage) to the marchers by one of the leaders, expressing their determination to fight until victory is won. I was able to arrange a most effective crescendo for the marchers by putting the singers in a lavatory adjoining the back of the stage and opening the door very gradually as the marchers approached the house.A third new show was made up of Russian songs. ‘The Funeral Song for a Dead Comrade’, ‘The Prison Song’, several songs of the Red Army, etc. While each one was being sung, an appropriate scene was enacted on stage. The first performance took place at the Ladies Tailors’ Trade Union Hall, Whitechapel, on Monday 17 December 1928. Monica Ewer wrote an enthusiastic review of it in the Daily Herald:

There were seven little scenes illustrating the Russian workers’ rise from slavery to freedom and each was accompanied by a song; they were most artistically produced and were a striking example of what brains and taste can do without any great expenditure except for time and trouble. Our next venture was Singing Jailbirds by Upton Sinclair. It dealt with the imprisoned Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) in the United States. We rehearsed it at a garage on the corner of Well Street, Hackney; this was the first time we had met for rehearsals anywhere except in private houses. We booked a church hall for the performance: the hall of St Bartholomew’s in Dalston Lane. When we gathered for the dress rehearsal the Saturday before the show was due to open, we found the vicar was there. I realized we had two alternatives: a dress rehearsal and no show - as the vicar would certainly object to what he heard - or no dress rehearsal and a show. So I passed the word for a props, lights and movements run-through, but no words.The show went on to a packed house. But we realized that in spite of its powerful appeal, the effect of the play was profoundly

pessimistic. In the play, the Wobblies are not released from their cells. They suffer as martyrs in their cause. The play was in effect a glorification of martyrdom. Was this the message we wanted to give our audiences? After a discussion in the group it was decided there would be no repeat performance.Sometime in 1928 I attended a committee meeting of the Workers’ Theatre Movement - a group which was run in associ­ation with the Caxton Hall, Westminster. The Movement was almost moribund. I formed the opinion that while we could do little to help them as an acting group (they were far away in West London), we should at least combine forces. At the next meeting of the Hackney People’s Players I proposed that we should become part of the Workers’ Theatre Movement, and this was agreed. I sent Christina Walshe, who was the convenor of the WTM, the draft constitution which I had drawn up for the Hackney group, hoping that it could serve as a model for other groups which might come into existence by our example. But I learned that the WTM had now collapsed. In this way our group became the nucleus of what was to be an entirely new movement.6After the Upton Sinclair play we started searching around for a new dramatic form. We were fumbling towards the idea of an Agit-Prop theatre - a theatre without a stage, a theatre which would use music and song and cabaret, and which could improvise its own material instead of going in for full-length set pieces, a theatre in which the audience could take part. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists demanded a stage, many rehearsals, people who would give up a lot of time. I realized we needed shorter things.Two developments seemed to point possible ways forward. The Manchester group we heard had put on a show Still Talking for which the setting was an ordinary public meeting with ‘planted’ actors in the audience interrupting and finally making speeches. It had no props whatever, and contained a number of different sketches with a direct political message put on at area conferences of political parties.I had long thought we could put on a revue, a collection of items with singing, dances, sketches and individual items all making pungent comments on some aspects of the political scene. Such a show could be taken apart whenever required - we could use monologue, a couple of scenes, or one or more of the sketches. It would be infinitely flexible. But how to provide the music for

88 The Workers’ Theatre Movement (1926-1935): Narrative the songs? It happened to be just the period of the new ‘all talking’ films of which songs were the main ingredient. So ‘The Wedding of the Dancing Doll’ became for us the opening of ‘The Talking Doll’, a satire on Parliament, and Al Jolson’s ‘Sonny Boy’ became ‘Money Boy’. In the autumn of 1929 we put on Strike Up at the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, an evening of mixed items: of songs accompanied by dancing and an orchestra, sketches and monologues. It was an important breakthrough for us: for the first time there was plenty of laughter as well as indignation. It was entitled Strike Up because of the number of strikes which were then occurring all over the country and also because we were striking out on a new style of show. In Strike Up there was a kind of antiphony between the group on stage and another group we sprinkled in the hall. At the appropriate moment they responded to what was happening on stage by saying ‘Yes, strike!’ so that it sounded as if the whole audience in the hall was calling for a strike (Clifford Odets used the same device a few years later, in Waiting For Lefty).7In 1931 we went to Germany.8 We learned that there was an International Workers’ Theatre Movement based on Moscow and we had written to German comrades in the Arbeitertheaterbund Deutschlands, sending them some of our material and telling them what we were doing. They invited us to bring our group over and do a tour of the Rhineland at Easter. We started at Cologne where there was an enormous meeting in the Exhibition Hall. We were greeted with great enthusiasm up on the platform though there wasn’t much we could put on - we had no material in German. We were able to take part in a special section written for ‘Die Engländer’ and learned one or two of their songs. And then we toured the Rhineland up to Koblenz.The Arbeitertheaterbund (ATB)9 had originally been part of the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats had provided a life within the state, really: they had Social Democratic organizations in pract­ically everything, including music and theatre. The ATB had a very large organization all over Germany with highly artistic and technically competent people, but they were coming more under the influence of the Communists. The people now in control of the Arbeitertheaterbund were against the naturalistic theatre. They were convinced that the propaganda theatre could be a spearhead of the whole movement. They faced considerable opposition, and

you can see that for groups who were used to the tradition of amateur theatre, working under good conditions, and having their own audience organized for them by the Social Democrats and good stages and all the rest of it, the idea of coming on the streets wasn’t very inviting. But the Agit-Prop tendency seemed to be winning the day. Their shows were very flexible. If there was any sort of interruption they would stop the play and say, ‘Well come on, we’ll argue it out, that’s what we want you to do.’ There was no illusion about it. The people were dressed up in dungarees and the audience could interrupt. It didn’t matter. It added to the theatre. Their performances were absolutely smashing. We could see that. They were all very fine actors. They didn’t change their clothes though they appeared physically different in each scene. They used a lot of music and song, drawing on the tradition of German cabaret. I said to Arthur Pieck who was the organizer, ‘You must have some wonderful people who write this music for you.’ He replied, to my astonishment, ‘We do it ourselves’ and convinced me that given some natural aptitude, writing tunes for songs could be just as effective as the amateurs who wrote plays and sketches.We could not hope to emulate the brilliance of the German performances. But by adopting the revue style - which we had already been working towards - we could, almost at once, achieve the freedom of the streets, however crude our initial material and performances might be.When we got back to England we decided to try it, building up a show from different items, and working to break down the barriers between players and audience. We were full of enthusiasm for the idea of groups who could create their own repertoire, and talk to the people directly on the streets. We rejected the idea of playing to friends and relatives, which was the basis of most amateur dramatics, or of asking people to come and pay money, which was the basis of the commercial theatre. We didn’t call ourselves Agit-Prop, but we adopted the same basic idea. Instead of a theatre of illusion ours was to be a theatre of ideas, with people dressed up in ordinary working clothes. No costumes, no props, no special stage. ‘A propertyless theatre for the propertyless class’ we called it.From that point on we had a most tremendous growth, aban­doning the closed theatre and going to where the people were, on

the streets. Before then - although we called ourselves the Workers’ Theatre Movement - we had just been one main group in London. Very soon we had some ten groups in London, and all over the country from Bristol to Dundee, from Rochdale to Reading, new groups were formed. The groups’ titles proclaimed their political allegiance to the revolutionary left - Dundee Red Front Troupe, Woolwich Red Magnets, Greenwich Red Blouses, etc. The Hackney group became Red Radio, opening their show with a song:

We are Red Radio,Workers’ Red Radio,We show you how you’re robbed and bled:The old world’s crashing,Let’s help to smash it,And build a workers’ world instead. Not great verse, but sung to a rousing tune, it said something and meant something.We had weekly meetings of our Central Committee and a monthly all-London Show. This was held in a trade union hall in Blackfriars Bridge Road, a small hall holding two or three hundred people.10 The groups came to try out their pieces and to learn from each other. They took our material but if they found it unaccept­able they wrote their own. Most of the people who joined the groups were youngsters, but the Streatham group had a man in his fifties, Bill Woodward, a taxi-driver, a splendid comrade. Phil Poole, who became the secretary, was working almost full time with us. So was Charlie Mann (Tom Mann’s son) who wrote some of our sketches and who produced our paper Red Stage (later New Red Stage). John Horrocks, who was later active in the Workers’ Music Association, ran our music side, issuing song sheets and song books.A lot of our material was satirical, about the press, about the ILP and about the Labour Party, though we were a bit happier after 1931, when we were attacking a National Government instead of a Labour Government. One of our earliest sketches, written in 1929 I think, was about war memorials - there was a spate of them at the time.